I waited two months into Stay Home to bake my first loaf of banana bread (with zucchini), which was shortly followed by starting a sourdough starter. I’ve been fermenting my own kombucha for about a year and have fermented chili-garlic paste to ferment kimchi, but the pound of yeast in my fridge led me (for good reason) to put off fermenting flour + water.

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I followed the directions from the kitchn. Warning: the site has a fair amount of ads, but the directions are thorough and made me feel confident in my wild yeast harvesting ability.

The day 5 directions indicate that 1/2 of the starter should be used or discarded. I’m not one to discard just about anything–you can hear me chanting “waste not one grain of rice!” when wrapping up leftovers–and as I have had success with their recipes in the past, I chose to follow the advert at the end of the starter recipe to make a loaf of bread with the “discard” plus yeast (as we know, I have plenty).

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While it may look roughly like bread, this was a severe disappointment. My baking projects are almost exclusively 50% excellent and 50% “okay I’ll eat it, but never make it again”. However, waste not want not, right?

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Fortunately, we were out of breadcrumbs.

When I have stale bread, or small, nubby loaf heels, I usually cube and bake them to make croutons for french onion soup, but I already have about a half gallon of them in the freezer.

Making breadcrumbs is similar: cut the bread into thin slices, bake at a low temperature (I did 250°F) until extremely crisp, but not burned. Break into chunks into food processor (or blender, or coffee grinder if that’s all you have) and process until you are pleased with the consistency. Store in an airtight container in a cupboard.

However, neither the disappointing bread nor resulting crumbs were the reason behind this fermentation project. Can you guess?

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Store bought “sourdough” english muffins are not flavorful and I have plenty of time on my hands to rectify this.

I had five days to peruse recipes online while my starter ripened, and I settled on this one based on not only the sheer volume of positive reviews, but most of them added photos! Surely I could follow this recipe and yield a product that at least looked like it should.

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I ended up with 20 portions and a wee nob left over to make a tester. So far so good! It looked like an english muffin, had a nice crumb, and tasted good too! I was all set to cook up the rest.

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A rousing success for my first try.

The only downside? Just like store bought they weren’t sour enough! Hopefully now that my starter is older and more pungent the next batch will be even better.

This afternoon, as an experiment, I added some of the starter to this week’s batch of naan (called narn in our household). It’s rising now and here’s hoping for delicious! Did you challenge yourself to bake anything new this week?